Mathilde Krasker’s £1000 legacy from husband the late Leon Krasker stolen first day out from Brisbane while taking her children on trip to Paris for their education in 1923

‘Dundee Courier’, Monday 19 February 1923, page 3, ‘Pearl Necklace Disappears’. Image courtesy of Trove at National Library of Australia. Gale Document Number: GALE|JE3227957671.

More reports from Daily Mail, The Sunday Times (WA) and The Sunday Times (UK)

When Leon Krasker died on the track between Denham and Herald Bight in Shark Bay in 1916, his widow Mathilde Krasker suddenly had to find a way to replace Leon’s income as a pearl trader.

Leon had left behind five children all in need of clothing, educating, feeding and housing, a family comprising George (aged 11), Georgette (aged 10), Marie (aged 8), Stephanie (aged 6) and Robert (aged 3).

No evidence has been left behind of how successful Leon’s pearl trading business had been just as no information is available as to how lucrative it might have been after Mathilde Krasker took it over, declaring it as her profession on several official and travel documents in subsequent years.

By the time the start of 1923 came around George was 17, Georgette was 16, Marie was 14, Stephanie was 12 and Robert was 9.

They were the children of parents who grew up speaking multiple languages – Mathilde with German and French, and Leon with Romanian and French – and the Krasker kids’ clearly non-English surname stood out against the mostly English-surnamed children amongst whom they learned, lived and played in Western Australia.

The five young Kraskers had been born into several countries with several different native languages – French, English and Strine – and needed decent education in two of those languages if they were to succeed in life within Australia and outside of it.

If George and Georgette had completed their formal education by late 1922 then they were in need of training for suitable professions and would that have been available in Denham at the time?

What further education and career training were suitable to meet Marie’s, Stephanie’s and Robert’s needs in Denham or Perth?

Leon and Mathilde had been educated in Paris and Leon had also trained there as a goldsmith, amongst extended family members who were jewellers and goldsmiths, tailors and furriers, so they knew the quality of the education that was available formally and informally amongst the arcades, galleries, museums, salons and streets of the French metropolis.

Further incentive to move back there may have already revealed itself in nine years-old Robert, a creative inclination that could hardly have been satisfied in Western Australia enough to turn it into a life-sustaining career there.

If Mathilde Krasker had planned on financing her family’s travel, sustenance and education with Leon’s legacy then she could not have foreseen it would be snatched away from her just after departing the port of Brisbane.

In his book Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker, Dr Falk Schwarz writes that Robert Krasker endured two life-shaping tragedies, his father’s death and falling ill with the malaria and type 1 diabetes that wrecked his health, shortened his career and lead to a premature death at the age of 67.

I suggest that the theft of the pearl necklace that Leon had bestowed to Mathilde was a third life-shaping tragedy, one that would have deeply affected them all, compounding tragedy upon tragedy and shaping all the Krasker children’s lives in ways they never deserved.

According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, “£1,000 in 1923 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £75,782.69 today, an increase of £74,782.69 over 101 years”, and in 2024 Australian dollars that is equivalent to $146,479.98.

Fact Checks

• “Mrs Krasker, a Rumanian …” – Mathilde Krasker was born in Chernivtsi in 1882 when it was located in Austria and thus she was Austrian at birth, and now her birthplace is in Ukraine. She was a naturalized Australian at the time of the theft.
• “a wealthy woman passenger …” – An assumption based on what exactly? That Mathilde Krasker had a pearl necklace and some US dollars in her possession before they were stolen?
• “a parcel of pearls, valued at £100, and 10 American 10-dollar gold pieces …” – Reports disagree on the contents and value of what was stolen so which newspaper’s reporter is more credible?
• “A pearl necklace, worth several hundreds of pounds …” – That is quite some difference between £100, £1000 and “several hundreds”.
• “Mrs Krasker’s husband, recently deceased, was pearling in this State for a time.” – If by “pearling” they mean diving for pearls then that is incorrect given he was a dealer in pearls and pearl shells for buttons, buying from pearling lugger captains to sell on the world market. Leon Krasker died in 1916 and the theft took place in 1923 so that “recently” equates to seven years.
• A parcel of pearls, a score in number, wrapped in a package, or a pearl necklace? – More disagreement about the facts between journalists and which of them is correct?

Robert Krasker wasn’t the only Krasker family member to undergo misadventures: George Krasker was fined in Perth for following some bad advice as Australian agent for a French manufacturer

George Krasker in The West Australian, Wednesday 29 June 1927, page 10, ‘Customs Prosecutions: Agent Fined £80’. Image courtesy of Trove at the National Library of Australia, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/32036562

As Dr Falk Schwarz writes in his book Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker, Robert’s life was dogged by tragedy, starting with the accidental death of his father Leon Krasker on the track between Denham and the pearl luggers’ beach at Herald Bight on 26 September 1916 when Robert was three years old.

The next Krasker misadventure was in 1939 while he was working in Sudan as camera operator on The Four Feathers and fell seriously ill with a severe case of malaria that induced the type 1 diabetes that would shorten his career and lead to an early death.

Older brother George experienced his share of misadventure in 1927 after he took some bad advice from H. Geleedts & Co., a French manufacturer for which he was acting as agent while operating out of George Street, Sydney after returning from the family’s first educational sojourn in Paris from 1923 to 1926.

Reports from The Daily News, Kalgoorlie Miner, The Sydney Morning Herald & The Mercury

With Leon long gone as the main provider for the family, those who could had to contribute beginning with newly widowed Mathilde taking over the pearl trading business and running it as long as she could.

George established his own business in Sydney after returning from Paris, acting as agent and importer for the Geleedts company whose principles had kindly suggested some invoicing tricks that, inevitably, were discovered by Australian customs agents leading to the Perth court case covered in these press clippings.

Sisters Georgette, Stephanie and Marie aka Mitzi, meanwhile, were featured in Western Australian newspapers in a different light for their educational achievements and charitable endeavours with father Leon being publicly thanked for his own contributions to charity.

I’ll publish those press clippings in other posts here as they all add to painting a picture of a family who, despite all the challenges, tragedies and mistakes they endured in a place so far from their origins, did their best to make a good and productive life here in Australia.

The story of Robert Krasker and his family echoes down the years since Leon Krasker made his first visit to Western Australia in 1907, living in places familiar to me and walking down many of the same streets there that I did so many decades later.

My latest look into Australia’s national archives also turned up another Krasker who made several visits here as a United Nations employee and his own history is a remarkable one too.

‘The Gazette’, the UK’s “official public record”, proves useful for research on Robert Krasker, his family, their companies and even changes of surname and nationality

‘The Gazette’, Web site, search results for “Krasker”, 27 March 2024.

I came across a new source of information earlier this week and I just had to share it with you, dear readers. As you may have gathered I am new to this research thing and would not have taken it up if not for discovering the great but forgotten Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker, BSC via a screening of The Third Man on Australian free-to-air television in 2023.

So far as I know there is no manual for would-be researchers into great but forgotten creatives so I have been doing it by the seat of my pants, as it were, and without a research budget to pay for travel to national and research libraries, access to paywalled databases, fee-demanding image collections, Krasker’s 60+ films on BluRay and DVD and the like.

A repository like The Gazette is a real find given it records information about Robert Krasker and his family outside the obvious film industry sources and their more predictable stories.

Search results on “Krasker” at The Gazette

Who would have guessed that Krasker had his own company, Robert Krasker (Photographic) Limited, and that he closed it down in 1968, definitively signalling his retirement from the world of feature filmmaking?

Or that his sister Stephanie had married a German surnamed Baumgarten and gave up her British Nationality only to ask for it back in August 1937?

And that another sister, Georgette, decided to give up the family surname, Krasker, for more English-sounding Bellingham in January 1945?

Then there is the company named Kelstone Properties Limited that its Chairman George Krasker wound up in January 1983.

I’ve been researchng Robert Krasker and his family, going further in that direction than Dr Falk Schwarz, author of Farbige Schatten – Der Kameramann Robert Krasker, because I am intrigued at how one of the world’s greatest cinematographers could have grown up to be so creative in one of the least likely places in the world and despite so many disadvantages.

He was only three years old when his father Leon died outside the remote, tiny Western Australian town of Denham in Shark Bay, leaving the family without an income and stranded the opposite side of the world from its origins in Europe.

Although the Kraskers maintained a second address, 99 Hay Street in the Perth suburb of Subiaco, as well as 25 Knight Terrace, Denham, Western Australia in 1916 was hardly a world-class centre for art, education, filmmaking and photography.

I was exiled to that state in my mid-teens, suddenly ending a uniquely world-class state capital high-school education that I hoped would get me to Europe and into the universities, profession and career I had wanted since I was as young as Robert when his father died.

The schools in the rural towns that, like Denham, were located between desert and sea and to which my family was sent were anything but world-class with most of them set up as junior high schools feeding into agricultural colleges and a lifetime of low-paid farm work.

Mathilde Krasker knew that Denham’s little junior school offered even less: she and her late husband Leon had been educated in Paris as child refugees during the Belle Epoque, the era of Art Nouveau, late Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Symbolism, early Modernism, early cinema and red-hot scientific and technological innovation.

Denham and Subiaco would have come as a shock and so would Perth itself, nonetheless Mathilde and her children persevered until it had become obvious they would need to return to Paris which they did twice, in 1923 and 1929, before moving to Ealing not far from the film studios further west of London.

The Krasker family home at flat 13, Tudor Court, Gunnersbury Avenue, Ealing, London W5 in the multi-level red-brick complex. Screenshot from Apple Maps.

Mathilde’s new home at flat 13, Tudor Court, Gunnersbury Avenue, Ealing W5 became the family’s base of operations with Robert moving in during 1931 and Stephanie citing it in her application for re-admission to British nationality in 1937 after moving back from Germany on the ending of her marriage to Herr Baumgarten.

Georgette and Stephanie were the first to move out leaving George, Maria (“Mitzi”) and Robert there while the latter began establishing his cinematography career in Britain before taking up residence in a succession of flats and houses nearby.

When and where Robert Krasker lived, learned and worked clearly had formative influence on his life and career and those times and places exposed him to so much that found its way into his work.

Krasker’s unique family history exposed him to a range of cultures and languages that enabled him to hit the ground running as a camera assistant and translator at Paramount France’s Les Studios Paramount in Joinville-le-Pont.

His acute understanding of light and shade and their roles in expression and emotion would have been shaped by the light, landscapes and seascapes of Denham in Shark Bay long before he might have been exposed to any form of art, photography and the cinema in Subiaco, Perth and Paris.

A Robert Krasker who had not grown up in Western Australia would have been a very different Robert Krasker altogether.

Links

• The Gazette – Web site – “The Gazette is formally the combination of three publications: The London Gazette, The Belfast Gazette and The Edinburgh Gazette. The Gazettes are official journals of record. As a publication, The Gazette consists largely of statutory notices. This means that there is some legal requirement for the notice placer to advertise an event or proposal in The Gazette.”

Robert Krasker and his family could have ended up like this mother and her children had they not escaped Eastern Europe for Western Australia

On this day, 16 October 1941, a Ukrainian mother and her children await execution in Lubny, Ukraine. Image courtesy of Auschwitz Exhibition.

Mathilde and Leon Krasker immigrated from their respective hometowns of Chernivtsi in Ukraine and Tulcea in Romania via Paris where they were educated and married to Hackney in London then onwards to Subiaco in Perth and Denham in Shark Bay in Western Australia well before World War II.

Had they not done so then they may well have been executed like the family in the photograph above.

A major motivation for the Jews of Eastern Europe to move west was to escape the persecutions, programs and being forced into settlements, enacted upon them by successive waves of invaders and colonizers over many centuries.

There is no excuse for discrimination, persecution and genocide.

Robert Krasker and family at Ickenham Close, Ruislip HA4 7DJ, England in 1937. Right to left: Georgette “Getty”, Marie “Mitzi”, Mathilde, Robert, Irmela (married to Georges) with son George in foreground. Father Leon Krasker died in 1916 at Shark Bay, Western Australia. Image courtesy of Dr Falk Schwarz.

Links

• Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau – website
• Wikipedia – Chernivtsi – Mathilde Krasker née Rubel’s hometown.
• Wikipedia – Lubny
• Wikipedia – Tulcea – Leon Krasker’s hometown.